I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companies and undertakes advisory work. For my complete disclosure statement, click here. I have a background across various industries, owning businesses in the manufacturing, property and technology sectors and make my day to day living consulting to technology vendors and customers. I cover the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. My areas of interest extend to aviation technology, enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Update: SAP contacted me to point out that other vendors involved in the project were involved in the usability aspects and hence this can’t be cast as a “SAP failure” story. That is a valid point and I agree that there are multiple failures in play here. The core thesis however remains – traditional enterprise business is failing to offer the easy user experience that modern software customers need. SAP has done a lot of work in 2013 on the user experience aspects of software including the introduction of Fiori and Screen personas. They have also put together a Design and Co-innovation center

Last week the Wall Street Journal covered the news that Avon Products Inc. is halting a massive multi-year software project. Avon’s new management order system was rolled out initially in Canada and was to be extended globally thereafter. Avon balked however when the software rollout not only disrupted regular operations, but when implemented was so difficult to use that Avon representatives left the company “in meaningful numbers”. Avon was forced to write down somewhere between $100M and $125M on its balance sheet since it won’t be put to use globally as was initially intended and budgeted for.

This isn’t the first enterprise software debacle to strike Avon. Two years ago its Brazilian operations suffered under an Oracle system roll-out that contributed to disappointing earnings from the company’s operations in that country.

So what’s up? Enterprise IT systems are supposed to make organizations more efficient, not drag them down into a quagmire of process and inefficiency. And they certainly shouldn’t result in a large exodus of workers from the organizations implementing them.

Now in fairness to these two IT vendors, some of the problems can be attributed to Avon’s model whereby it has direct sales representatives on the ground – it is always going to be more difficult to roll out an enterprise software system with this sort of sales-force as opposed to a traditionally employed one. But beyond the Avon specifics, this story of a failed IT project is symptomatic of a far broader change in IT.

For years we’ve heard about the rise of the “Digital Natives”, the generation that has grown up immersed in technology. We’ve heard that when this generation starts to enter the workforce we’ll see a tipping point as they demand enterprise tools that are as easy and intuitive as the tools they use in their home life. But Avon sales people are generall not Digital Natives – they tend to be older and less attuned with the very latest in technology than the millenials. Rather than the digital native influx creating the IT revolution, we’re seeing something far more distributed.

Walk down the main street of any town in the developed world (and much of the developing world for that matter) and you see people of all ages, from all socio-economic groups and of ever race, color, creed and gender using smartphones to communicate. Largely thanks to the changes the iPhone brought, we have everyday people using a plethora of lightweight and simple applications. It’s not just the millenails grooving out on Facebook, but baby-boomers and beyond are Instagram-ing, WhatsApp-ing and SnapChat-ing with abandon. These people spend much of their waking moments using applications that are designed from the ground up to be easy to use.

In what should have set alarm bells ringing in the SAP media department, a representative of the company told the Wall Street Journal that “its software was working as designed, despite any issues with the implementation of the project”. It’s a sad indictment of enterprise IT vendors that they would consider an implementation where the end users refuse to use the product as “working as designed”.

In commenting on the debacle, industry analyst Michael Krigsman put it succinctly:

Basically, users will accept less crap today, when it comes to software. That is because the world of consumer software has become easy and simple to use and has trained users to expect that business software will follow a similar model. And if it doesn’t, people are much less patient than they were in the past.

There are a plethora of new startups hitching their caravan to this notion of the “consumerization of IT”. While that trend is often overstated, what cannot be overstated is the risk that traditional vendors face if they don’t start being laser-focused on making their solutions both fit-for-purpose in terms of functionality, but also in terms of ease of use. Users can no longer be dictated to, an entire generation of startups are building massive value for themselves by delivering solutions that end users actually want to use.

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To clear the record on roles in this project: Avon selected SAP technology as the back-end engine for its order entry solution. Avon did not use an SAP UI for the web front end. Avon selected and implemented a third-party eCommerce solution for that purpose. –Jim Dever, SAP

Regardless of the SAP spin from here, you’ve correctly identified an important shift taking place and one that all “legacy ERP and 1990′s software companies” are unable to address. The technology architecture and feature-function focus of SAP, ORCL, PSFT, etc. were never designed for user adoption other than by corporate mandate. Their reaction to date has been an attempt to slap “lipstick on the pig” with clumsy UI overlays or through acquiring younger cloud software companies who built their solutions with focus on end user. Watch for more transition to true cloud architected solutions whose focus on consumer like user experience and mobility drive results through adoption and use.

Is this a story about business technology and how it failed, or is this a story about a company that failed to truly understand their employees comfort level with technology or just new ways to do things. My Mom sold Avon 30 years ago and the front end business model has not changed significantly. People selling “people to people” using a book of pictures or a catalogue has been Avon’s success.

Without knowing any first-hand facts about this SAP implementation, I’m suspicious that this failure sounds very much like many more from the era when I worked on ERP installations two decades ago.

Yes, these are much revised products and no doubt better than those of my time. However, the problem on these implementations typically is completely unrelated to the technology.

Large complex projects fail more often than they succeed. This is generally true everywhere in the world, regardless of the industry. Another current example is the infamous web site of the Affordable Care Act.

Customer executives of these implementations should look in the mirror if they want to see who is commonly most responsible for these failures.

This reality is well known by practitioners who survive this “war” but rarely will you ever see this reality communicated before, during, or after these disasters.

@Jim Dever: We all get that SAP isn’t accountable, and certainly isn’t relevant, as to the point of the article. Let’s not blame just SAP when IBM’s ecommerce offering was a major contributor, as were the traditional SI … and the abject failure of Avon senior management.

I am one of thousands of Avon representatives that used the new system when it was introduced in Canada. While some aspects worked quite well and continue to do so, there were and still are glitches daily. It can be frustrating when you have to spend a significant amount of time trying to process an order, a fairly routine task. To date, the tracking system is inaccurate, items added to an order disappears, items that were reserved disappears. So definitely, the IT system is defective. But I think Avon’s biggest failure is not IT, it is its inadequate communication with its independent representatives. It is sad that a company that has been in existence for 125 yrs cannot do better. Fortunately for Avon, there is a core of dedicated, passionate representatives who are prepared to keep going no matter what.

I’ve been employed with a company in the same multi-level marketing industry similar to Avon which implemented SAP. It was a software solution primarily for order taking, consultant/distributor enrollment, and inventory. It took a few years to complete the roll-out because every aspect of the original system being used was documented, and proper programming was designed in SAP to handle the change from one system to another. There was a lot of testing and auditing which took place. In the end, it was a successful implementation, and has served that company well for the last several years.

What is fairly typical is many companies have a vision of what they want, but when they’re as seasoned as Avon they need to take a long hard look at what they currently have, and make sure all processes are documented, they collaborate between departments, they test, audit and look for gaps in the new system vs. the one currently being used. If done correctly, it can be a success. Don’t jump ahead only to be disappointed with the end results.

Surely this is just another example of a project not adhering to a suitable methodology such as PRINCE2 throughout the project’s lifecycle, I can’t help thinking that the biggest failure here is that the project wasn’t stopped sooner.

Avon’s executive management team for the SAP implementation is squarely to blame; for it’s their responsibility to deliver and they utterly failed. The biggest problem with their management team was that, to the individual, they were dinosaurs complaining of the cold.

The executives in charge were mostly older women, promoted so far beyond their abilities, and assigned their last project before retiring. Executive fiat made by Mean Girls. Your reality was determined by their consensus. All communications done by color coded symbols; safe but senseless.

The gladiator-like presentations conducted by the ‘consultant on the outs’ to a hostile crowd were the basis of termination by the doddering executive counsel – a la Caesar. It was really quite entertaining as a spectator, as bread and circuses go. Not so fun facing the lions, though.

The SAP implementation, called the Promise program, was to eliminate the expense of people manning call centers. To cut ‘people’ costs and save the company money, Avon reps are to order everything exclusively online through an eCommerce portal (IBM interface with SAP back-end).

There is NO mobile solution by design. Young women simply aren’t Avon reps, and won’t likely be. The most successful Avon reps are older women from emerging countries or small towns. They have always done inventories on paper, and talked with the Call Center to place orders or check on shipments.

The only people who actually generate revenue – the Avon Ladies, work exclusively through meaningful, interpersonal, enduring relationships. It involves active problem-solving between the Avon Lady and her dear friend, a friendly neighbor, or decades-long coworker. ‘People’ is the business.

To eliminate the Avon Lady’s biggest ally – a helpful person at the Call Center placing her orders, checking on shipments, and instead impose an online proxy – THAT is the single point of failure. Not technology.

Avon’s executives didn’t know – or didn’t care – that Internet access is a first world, big city privilege. Globally, going online is prohibitively expensive and often unreliable. But everyone can make a phone call.

Avon didn’t just lose their money; they lost the very heart of their business.

There is no way SAP should get away with pointing the finger towards anyone but themselves. The truth is, “out of the box” SAP implementations are horrifically unusable (if it was good, there would have been no need for a third-party vendor to design the system). SAP can blame their clients or the implementation vendors, but their software simply does not care about building for the end user.

I’ve heard so many stories of CIOs losing their jobs and companies going bankrupt because of a botched SAP implementation – I’d be curious if the author of this article would be willing to conduct a survey of CIOs who have decided to implement SAP… I would bet there is some very telling data.

OCM, OCM, OCM. It has ceased to amaze me that the #1 killer of new implementations is a lack of Organized Change Management. When I first started Consulting (SAP BASIS) I thought of OCM as an optional function that smart clients staffed and inexperience clients cut corners on. Boy how have I grown in that respect. OCM ‘is’ the Implementation. From Business Case to Audit to Optimization, Organized Change Management is exactly that, an organized effort to Sense needs or pain, Envision a set of solutions, Offer the solutions, Mitigate concerns of the people most affected, get the users to Commit to the solution, help the users Sustain the new practice, Audit, and Repeat. It ain’t rocket science, it is Human Behavior. In order to get a community to Adopt an innovation (SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, etc) it is necessary to get the input of that community throughout the process. Very few people like change. The people who are pioneers all too often forget this and think most people should just see the benefits, and when these pioneers are not the Front End users, they typically fail to take heuristics into account. The little things that help the big things happen. ERP Implementers, IMHO, put too much emphasis on so-called Best Practices, so much so they often overlook the nuances that make their client competitive. I didn’t work on AVON, but there are signs they thought an ERP was the right thing to do without understanding the complexities of transitioning large and complex organizations.